Progress Report, Week Ten

This week in my research journey I should be done with at least my presentation and my research paper and I am done with both of those plus my publication. Though it was a hard weekend, I definitely reached my intended goal and then some. My only issues I ran into this week was having too much information to talk about, even after I narrowed a ton of it down into graph form I still had over 30 pages of reporting material. I overcame this by slowly whittling down and eliminating unnecessary information or excessive numbers that weren’t adding to the overall solution I found.

This week started by trying to pound out the research paper as quickly as possibly, which is what I expected to accomplish this week at the very least. I did end up accomplishing a lot more than I planned by finishing both my presentation and publication along with my research paper in 5 days, which I didn’t expect to have time to finish. I have nothing left to do now except share it with my class tonight.

The most surprising thing I learned about research this term was how hard it was to research some topics that don’t have any scholarly work relating to the topic. Technology for instance is horrible to research sometimes, because 1) it changes constantly and 2) your work consists of almost entirely of primary sources assuming you can find them. Some times you will find 2 out of 5 pieces of information your looking for and then when you look at another company you get 4 out of 5 pieces of information. I have never had to research something so recent like this before and it was surprising how difficult it was to locate all the details.

In my future C.I.S. career I assume I will have to research something about new technology at one point and this was certainly good practice for that. I had to become pretty adept at finding primary sources and making sure my information was accurate if it wasn’t a primary source and I expect that my future bosses will expect me to do the same when investigating hardware or software upgrades/problems. Researching technology is an entirely different animal than what I am used to and I suspect that I have only just touched the surface of this deeply complicated pool of information.